Video of Paul Graham’s Talk, "The Power of the Marginal"

In an earlier entry, I talked about one of my favourite presentations from the RailsConf conference, Paul Graham’s The Power of the Marginal, a talk about the upside of being on the outside.

I linked to the text of his keynote earlier, and now I’ve got something better: the video of his keynote, recorded by ScribeStudio.

While the talk was delivered to an audience of programmers who use the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails web programming framework — both of which are small, “indie” and “outside” compared to commercial offerings like Java and Microsoft’s .NET — it is applicable to anyone who creates, whether it’s by entering code into a computer, making music, painting, making buildings, and so on. The drummer for the Thirsty Cups (a band who performed after Paul’s keynote) isn’t a programmer, but he found that the keynote relevant to him as well.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of his keynote:

One reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that there’s so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything. If the number of outsiders is huge it will always seem as if a lot of ideas come from them, even if few do per capita. But I think there’s more going on than this. There are real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of work they can outweigh the advantages.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided to commission someone to write an official Great American Novel. First there’d be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose. Most of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one side or the other. Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition. The committee would choose one at the height of his career– that is, someone whose best work was behind him– and hand over the project with copious free advice about how the book should show in positive terms the strength and diversity of the American people, etc, etc.

The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Not wanting to blow such a public commission, he’d play it safe. This book had better command respect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy. Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone knows, America plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that’s what it would have to be about. Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus you can show a lot of strength and diversity. When finally completed twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels– roughly Gone with the Wind plus Roots. But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller for a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host’s autobiography. The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

It’s a great presentation. Go check it out.